Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop, multiplayer games to life. Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017. Previously Jeri was a race car driver, computer shop owner, and toy industry veteran. She was also recruited to Valve to lead the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the ..read more

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com. Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.  He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro ..read more

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality. Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-commerce company and a legal clinic for startups. Maryam was drawn into the world of VR, where she spent several years working as a founder or consultant across several projects, before taking on the r ..read more

Ohto Pentikäinen and Jamin Hu are the co-founders of Port 6, a company creating human-computer interaction technologies which are initially focused on detecting the moment of touching an object. Ohto is a serial entrepreneur having been a co-founder and CEO twice by the age of 20 before co-founding Port 6. His earliest venture was reimagining the highschool learning experience by creating a platform for multidisciplinary, self-directed learning. Jamin has a passion for music and earned a degree in Classical Piano Performance before expanding his focus to pursue a masters degree in biomedical ..read more

Stan Larroque is the CEO and co-founder of Lynx, a company creating the first all-in-one mixed reality headset. The Lynx R1 offers a unique VR device with good video-passthrough of the real world to create mixed reality experiences. Stan was inspired by the early Oculus device, the DK2, but wanted a better connection to the real world. As he finished his university education, he embarked on the journey to establish the leading European mixed reality hardware technology company. Along the way, he’s received support from industry founders and insiders including Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, and ..read more

David Jiang is the CEO and founder of VITURE, a company creating a smartglasses solution for video gaming and streaming content. After studying human computer interaction and industrial design at university in China, David continued his studies into human computer interaction at Harvard, where he fell in love with the Boston Celtics basketball team. David joined Google in the early years of their work on Google Glass and went on to become the Chief Designer and Head of AR for AI company, Rokid. David then became CEO of Meteorolite, where he pushed the boundaries of AR positioning technology an ..read more

Cayden Pierce describes himself as a transhumanist hacker working to enhance our intelligence using AI, smartglasses, and eventually, neurotech. Cayden posts regularly about the current state of smartglasses and is actively developing open source smartglasses hardware and middleware solutions. To support those efforts and to facilitate insights between end users and smartglass makers, he recently started the H2O Smartglasses community. Cayden is also working on a contextual search engine at Emex Labs to help deliver meaningful utility to the smartglasses of the future. In this conversation ..read more

Ari Grobman is the CEO of Lumus, a company developing a novel optics solution for AR glasses.  Before going any further, let me provide a little perspective up front: When I consider the biggest hurdles to delivering consumer-grade AR, optics and displays are at the top of the list. The display and the combiner optics are two separate, but intimately connected, engineering challenges. Lumus sells an “optical engine” that includes a microdisplay from a third party, but their real magic is in the combiner optics, the part that directs the light from the display system into our eyes and com ..read more

Damir First is the co-founder and CCO of Matterless, a company creating genre-defining experiences in shared augmented reality—emphasis on “shared.” Early in his career, Damir earned a Master of Arts in both Sociology and Art History before pursuing his Ph.D. in Anthropology. He has been a lecturer for a number of courses spanning design, history, architecture, and art, and he has since worked in blockchain technologies as well as a narrative designer for popular video games. While a tech entrepreneur and academic, Damir is a D&D dungeon master at heart who thinks deeply about the role of ..read more

Today I am kicking off 2023 with another annual monologue. I hope you and your family were able to have a safe and relaxing holiday, even in the face of another arctic blast and spate of viral diseases. This is the sixth such annual kickoff episode, and when looking back at my notes from last year, the big surprise from 2022 was the resounding commitment shown by Meta and others to continued investment in VR & AR technologies, despite heavy financial losses and Wall Street pressure. That commitment is necessary to see our industry through its slow progress for AR technology, and its still ..read more